fahd.blog: xmllint

Showing posts with label xmllint. Show all posts

Showing posts with label xmllint. Show all posts

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Validating XML with xmllint

The following commands show you how to validate an XML file against a DTD or XSD using xmllint.

To validate an XML file against:

a DTD stored in the same file:

xmllint --valid --noout fileWithDTD.xml

a DTD stored in a separate file:

xmllint --dtdvalid DTD.dtd --noout fileWithoutDTD.xml

an XSD stored in a separate file:

xmllint --schema schema.xsd --noout file.xml

The --noout option suppresses the output of the xml file.

Example
To validate:

<countries>
  <country name="Afghanistan" population="22664136" area="647500">
    <language percentage="11">Turkic</language>
    <language percentage="35">Pashtu</language>
    <language percentage="50">Afghan Persian</language>
  </country>
  <country name="Albania" population="3249136" area="28750"/>
  <country name="Algeria" population="29183032" area="2381740">
    <city>
      <name>Algiers</name>
      <population>1507241</population>
    </city>
  </country>
</countries>

against:

<!ELEMENT countries (country*)>
<!ELEMENT country (language|city)*>
<!ATTLIST country name CDATA #REQUIRED>
<!ATTLIST country population CDATA #REQUIRED>
<!ATTLIST country area CDATA #REQUIRED>
<!ELEMENT language (#PCDATA)>
<!ATTLIST language percentage CDATA #REQUIRED>
<!ELEMENT city (name, population)>
<!ELEMENT name (#PCDATA)>
<!ELEMENT population (#PCDATA)>

use the command:

xmllint --dtdvalid countries.dtd --noout countries.xml

Sunday, February 20, 2011

XPaths with xmllint

xmllint is a command-line XML tool used to validate and pretty-print XML documents. More importantly, it offers an interactive shell mode which allows you to use xpaths to print out elements. For example, //body will print out the body element of an HTML document.

I wrote a useful bash function, which uses xmllint to evaluate xpaths really easily:

xpath()
{
    if [ $# -ne 2]; then
        echo "Usage: xpath xpath file"
        return 1
    fi
    xmllint --shell $2 <<< "cat $1" | sed '/^\/ >/d'
}

Example:

sharfah@starship:~> xpath "//body" index.html
<body>Hello World!</body>

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